Ubuntu Announces Mir, A X.Org/Wayland Replacement

[BitRot]

Well, for all the people wondering about GTK+/Gnome stuff in Ubuntu, Oliver Ries said in his email that Canonical will move all their "community backend" stuff to Qt.

[89c51]

It will be interesting to see if they can pull this off. Big thing I see is getting Nvidia and AMD on the bandwagon. I'm not going to hold my breath though. With xrdp not working with Unity currently, I'm not sure they can pull the whole thing off. Maybe they get the tablets and phones working, and call it quits there. Seems to be the market they want to play in anyway.

I am curious on this also. Wayland is in development for quite a few years and its not there yet. That with backing from intel. And while Canonical seems more focused i don't think they can pull it off.

Looks like the upstart "story" will repeat itself.

[Figueiredo]

It will be interesting to see if they can pull this off. Big thing I see is getting Nvidia and AMD on the bandwagon. I'm not going to hold my breath though. With xrdp not working with Unity currently, I'm not sure they can pull the whole thing off. Maybe they get the tablets and phones working, and call it quits there. Seems to be the market they want to play in anyway.

Unless canonical is completely out of touch with reality, Mir has probably been designed very closely with Valve, AMD and Nvidia. Since the so called SteamOS, which will most probably power the upcoming SteamBoxes is probably based on Ubuntu, if either AMD and/or Nvidia do not support ubuntu, they would be excluded from the steamboxes.

[Nuc!eoN]

This is a shame.... can't believe it...no words I'm already curious on Høgsberg's reaction

[pingufunkybeat]

So Ubuntu has finally jumped ship and is working on the Ubuntu Operating System, where they have near-total control. From that angle it makes sense to do everything from scratch.

We'll see how that pans out. I think that it will be a spectacular failure.

Supporting X makes sense. Supporting Wayland makes sense. Writing something different from scratch is insane. They obviously want out of the Linux/FreeDesktop community.

[chenxiaolong]

It seems there's not much technical description on this yet. How does Mir compare with Wayland? Does Mir provide perfect frames? Ie. no tearing?

I'm pretty excited about this. I hope Canonical provides on their promises. (But dang it, I just want to see X disappear already :P)

[rafirafi]

Why?

Why not just work on wayland...?

I think they want to be compatible with surface flinger so they can use proprietary drivers without spending any resources, this is not possible with wayland.
After all ubuntu exists for some time now and despite its best efforts canonical is not making any money on the PC market, and just a little on the server one. That's let the tablet market but they don't have the leverage to get the gpu makers to do drivers for us (users of xorg and maybe in the near future wyaland) which means they have to use existing drivers = android drivers.
The only problem is if they are succesfull in this approach the chances are we will never see open source drivers and wayland can just fade away...
But it's ubuntu and from day one it was clear that ubuntu was aimed to make money at some point, so this move is logical. Ubuntu is only disapointing because a lot of what they do is just of no interest for the upstream projects they use, contrarly to other companies making money with linux.

[Nuc!eoN]

no I know why compiz will not support Wayland

[mark45]

I am curious on this also. Wayland is in development for quite a few years and its not there yet. That with backing from intel. And while Canonical seems more focused i don't think they can pull it off.

Looks like the upstart "story" will repeat itself.

+1
The only good news is that hopefully the Wayland devs get their shit together quickly, or it'll die in time even if better.
The bad news is that Canonical will under-deliver, perhaps even miss the dead-line) while keeping spitting out buzz-words about Mir, just like with Unity. So if Mir makes it in 2014 on the desktop it will be a Wayland-wanna be, but it should be good enough by 2016.

[e8hffff]

It's a pity other have put a lot of time into Wayland or other projects.

I think Canonical has the right direction to support Android drivers and what they have stated.